Peggy Munson and Alicia E. Goranson were co-winners of the first Project: QueerLit contest for first-time queer novelists. With the release of Supervillainz Peggy had some questions for Alicia about the novel, writing, and transfolk.

PEGGY MUNSON: Can you talk about the seemingly allegorical parts of this book, especially since it is based in a place (Boston) where violence against transpeople has been so rampant?

ALICIA E. GORANSON: At its core, Supervillainz has a fairly standard action-thriller plotline, but it gets that allegorical edge because the protagonists are trans and genderqueer; they aren't as "safe" as if it was happening to Jack Bauer from 24. However, I'm not directly referring to the real-world violence against Rita Hester or other transpeople in the city. Supervillainz violence is abstracted from that. After all, it's being dished out by guys in big robot suits shaped like animals. I try to keep the same level of safety for the characters that any action-movie protagonist might have. They won't die, they won't be disabled, and they will get away in the end. But it wouldn't take much for things to go the other way for them.

I was playing with the main concept for years--a standard hero/villain story where the "villains" are forced into that role by the heroes. It made sense that transpeople would be the villains. We remind people about a lot of issues on their own appearance, mannerisms and ideas about gender. We're just going through our everyday lives, we get looked at wrong and bam! We're the bad person here. It's crazy.

The book is just trying to remind people about the everyday-lives part in an entertaining way.

PM: This book has such a local flavor to me. How much were the characters inspired by the personal villains and heroes in your world?

AG: I can only admit in public that the character Ryan is based on someone I know, who gave me permission. About half the "villains" are real people. The "heroes" are amalgams of people I grew up with. Feel free to read anything you want into that.

The book is my reconciliation of my passion for survivorship stories and my OCD instinct for traditional structure--epics and folktales. Heroes and villains are just roles but they have their own arcs which resonate for me. At the "tree" level, I like reading about ordinary believable events with people I can relate to, but at the "forest" level, I like a deliberate, well understood structure. It's amazing to me that we don't have as much media out there which can balance the two well. When I wrote the book, I was working out the means of facing my own insecurities about my social abilities, my body, and so forth. Everyone in there is me at some level. I can't understand these concepts of "good" or "bad"; we are who we are and we do what we do. "Heroes" and "villains" are just roles like Arthur and Mordred--anyone can play them and sometimes it helps to put our own struggles into that context to make sense of them.

PM: Both Project Queerlit-winning novels feature trans characters with unconventional narratives. What are your thoughts on the gender evolution in the arts? How do you feel like the landscape of trans characters is changing?

AG: It's finally becoming acceptable for kids to openly deal with being trans and that's rippling through the trans/genderqueer communities. People across the country are coming to realize that being trans isn't something that happens after a mid-life crisis in one's forties, or due to performing drag or sex work--very slowly, but it is happening. Trans literature is in its infancy--aside from a few non-traditional works like Charlie Anders' Choir Boy, the majority of trans books are memoir and gender theory. These are important because transpeople have a difficult time defining their identities--we are raised to be one thing and have to fight against it. Now we have kids growing up on whom that burden is significantly reduced, and generations of older folks who, frankly, are jealous of them. The variety of works featuring trans characters is going to explode into every market. What the effect will be, who knows, but at least we're going to get a diverse group of voices who experiences as transpeople are radically different, especially when broken down between class, ethnicity, access to medicines, and so forth.

It's finally becoming permissible to talk about our selves outside the trans box. The trans box is still very present but it's not 100% us--we aren't exclusively defined by it. That's going to make for some very interesting writing, and break us out of exclusively identity-based works.

PM: One thing I like about Bit and Devon is that there is no hackneyed coming-out or transitioning backstory. The reader is just thrown right into their action-packed universe and forced to deal. How much of this was an intentional effort to bend the retelling of the same old queer story? AG: It was very intentional. These people are completely unapologetic for whom they are and their identities aren't the crux of the story. It's about two families forced against each other through bigotry and misunderstanding. Of course they doubt their own courage and will in their private moments, but not their gender identities. They already dealt with those and wish other people would stop bringing them up.

PM: I'm thinking of the comics at your website, and also about the comics done by characters in Queer as Folk and how they shape the identities of those in the show into hyperbolic versions of themselves. How do you think queer culture parallels a comics reality?

AG: I don't think that at all. We tell stories to get to chunks of truth lodged deep inside us to come out, but they can never encompass the whole of our realities. All art involves an individual who can only focus on a few aspects of her reality at a time. Writing is especially controlled.

We have a lot of empathy towards comics and cheesy sci-fi movies--things which can safely hold an essence of our experiences. We can make stories about the Transsexual Fury or Hothead Paisan wrecking vengeance against the loan collector or the guys who beat us up last night because we don't always have the resources to take care of these things ourselves. But I don't think our lives, in any way, mirror those fictional worlds. They may for brief instants, but they are never that cut-and-dry.

PM: Don't laugh at me, but I kept thinking about animatronics robots breeding with college mascots to make the Supervillainz. How did you come up with the Supervillainz?

AG: Their concept was the vision I always had of traditional comic book superheroes--naturally privileged people who can't see the damage they do to the paper-thin world around them. They don't want to understand so they don't bother, and the world works their way naturally so they don't suffer at all from their ignorance.

For their physical appearance, the Armed Services have been doing research for years on using robotics to enhance physical strength, communications and reaction time. It was a great metaphor. I assigned heraldic animals to them to give them a primal feel, like tapping into aspects of Shamanic practice, and to make it easy to refer to them by their outfit.

PM: They say a first novel is almost always autobiographical in some way. What parts of you and your life went into this book?

AG: It's funny; the real Ryan read the first scene of the first chapter and said to me, "I'm sorry that happened to you." And I had to explain that never happened to me, but it might to Bit. She's much more optimistic about the Boston queer scene and would take risks like that. She's a dumping ground for a lot of my fears and prejudices.

There is a long section where Bit and Devon go to the Super family's hometown--not my hometown but nearby. That's essentially me going home again. My high school English teacher is in it and she may kill me when she finds out.

I've been to all the locations in the book, which aren't necessarily in the areas of town I've placed them.

I'm an emotionally vulnerable person and this book let me scream a lot. But I'm better now, really.

PM: I'm suddenly thinking of the recent documentaries that feature humans who are "queer" in the sense that they relate more to animals than to conventional social mores--such as in the film Grizzly Man (about the guy who lives with grizzlies in Alaska and is ultimately eaten by one) and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (about a man who has no discernible income yet devotes his life to managing a flock of wild birds). I'm intrigued by the collision of technology, animal forms, and queerness in Supervillainz. Can you talk about this? And also, about how being trans creates aspects of endangerment that might not be found in a more insulated human reality?

AG: Transfolk can be pretty raw--ask anyone who comes to the Gendercrash open-mike in Boston. In Supervillainz, the heroes get to assume animal forms but I don't explore that in detail. It's what they do for their work and they are just as unapologetic about it.

Transpeople have to mine away at the layers of meaning which our bodies have accumulated as much as our minds and spirits. It will never be a perfect process. If body-replacement ever becomes a reality, many other people will have to deal with a lot of the same issues we have. It's a lot of soul searching. The endangerment comes from when we remind other people about gender concepts they don't want to think about--is a straight guy straight if he's attracted to a non-passing transwoman? What if someone he respects finds out?

A lot of what binds the "queer" community is our assumptions of each other--we don't have to keep our guard up around issues like gender, polyamory, sexual preference, kink, and so forth when we're with each other. It's such a relief. We have a lot of other issues with access to resources and interpersonal drama but that's another story.

PM: This book is very action-packed for sure. It really makes me think of how queers have been left out of historical action and ascribed to small, cultish, indie depictions. How much did this prompt your decision to portray queers as being THE nexus of big-screen-like action?

AG: My first thought was that I should put out literary fiction with the trappings of a solid adventure story which happens to have characters who are trans and genderqueer. I wanted to show other writers that you could do it without getting preachy or wrapped in theory. As a writer, it's vital to be respectful to the characters and to agonize over their presentation as a vulnerable minority, but you don't have to show it.

Really, adding trans characters doesn't have to be as hard and everyone makes it, and they can really spice up a more traditional work!

PM: Anne Lamott describes publication as "a cross between the last few weeks of pregnancy, when you look and feel like Orson Welles…and the first day of seventh-grade PE class, when they make you line up by size before they hand out your gym uniforms." How did you feel when you found out you won Project Queerlit? How do you feel now that your book is actually going to be READ?

AG: I was deeply honored by the judges who chose my book along with yours. The reality of having other people read the book has not sunk in yet. It's like the first time any large group of people will have read anything of mine--I really don't know what it's like to be read by many people. I'm very honored that so many people have preordered it already.

PM: If Supervillainz became a blockbuster film, who would direct it and star in it?

AG: As Anne Rice and others have shown us, the only thing over which writers have control is how large to make the advertisement in the New York Times to publicly denounce the movie made from their book. In hypothetical terms, I could see Kevin Smith as the director. The main cast would be trans and genderqueer actors, the same as the characters, but I don't know any queer working actors offhand still in their early twenties.

Supervillainz would never be a blockbuster, though a movie very similar to it, with a full cast of straight white college students, might.

PM: Supervillainz has a very ambitious structure that seems to borrow from literary conventions but also take off on its own volition. What were your influences in writing this book and how did you structure it?

AG: I was such a comics geek back in the 1980s when the whole postmodern influence took off; complex characters within traditional narratives from United Kingdom writers who had Milton, Chaucer, and Stein drilled into them but their hearts lay in Burroughs and Grimm. I loved the visceral rhythms they played with, the cleverly distracting introduction, the explorations of certain themes, and a climax that pulls everything together. My problem was, most of these stories lacked empathy for the characters, particularly the girls and women. I loved Rubyfruit Jungle, Woman Warrior, and Bastard out of Carolina, and yet they lacked that overall structure. I didn't think it would be so difficult to marry the two together.

One of my favorite books (and television series) is James Burke's Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. He pulls together all these disparate events in history and ties them in together, showing how some influence others by something as simple as a conversation at a family gathering. He gets a little heavy-handed at times and some of the connections are dubious but he has enough solid material that it doesn't ultimately matter.

PM: You call yourself a "destructionist" writer. Can you tell me about that?

AG: By that, I mean tearing down stereotypical, expected narratives by deconstructing them to their core and then rebuilding them in a manner more pleasing to me. It's not satire; it's re-envisioning culture on top of, while subverting, older archetypes stripped of their offensive aspects. It's putting a geodesic dome on a sturdy dungeon instead of another castle.

I left all the old standbys--the villains do traditionally villainous things. Bit throws a woman in front of a car to escape from pursuit by one of the superheroes--classic Snidely Whiplash. The heroes do heroic things--they fight crime and battle injustice. As a reader, you just have to look a little harder than before to see it, and under its presented context, it's rather perverted.

PM: You also talk in your bio about pissing off post-modernists. I like that. When I think about post-modernism I often think of how people are relegated to diminishing identity boxes and left out of a larger whole. This book to me seems to reach for a larger whole, a bigger story. If a post-modernist academic DID get her hands on this book, how would you want her to teach it in class?

AG: I'm more of an entertainer than a theorist, so who knows? I'd be interested to hear her ideas. Perhaps something about confronting identity indirectly, as part of a larger whole of a person's life. I'm interested in writing as poking around to find alternative manners of accepting ourselves for who we are and determine what's holding the various aspects of us back. Writing does something physical to the reptilian portion of a reader's brain and I'm intrigued with exploring that as well--creating good "ah-ha!" moments when everything comes together can be as satisfying as an orgasm but stays with you a lot longer.

I'm mostly interested in affecting the way that transpeople in literature are viewed, as fully human protagonists.

PM: Do you have any advice for first-time novelists?

AG: Learn your energy cycles--how long you can keep going until you burn out, and how long you can let yourself go without falling into a writing stupor. Find the best physical place to focus yourself on your writing. Have a life, keep busy, and ideas come faster. Love people enough to lift them into your world. Read a lot because you'll find things to steal in the most unlikely places. Always ask why you're writing and if you can't answer, you need a break.

Above all, find someone to read your work. It'll keep you writing.